Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What a greedy green monster!

Long long time ago, I used to have a little black box that let me escape from the repeats of repeats on the free-to-air channels and get to watch what the rest of the world watches - fresh new TV programs.

Then one not-so-fine day, the cable operator announced a new digital box which was supposed to do exactly the same thing as the little black analog box, but in digital. Oh, and it didn't have a time display like the analog one. Gradually, the cable operator introduced more channels that were offered only on the digital box. Then gradually and sneakily more channels were removed from the analog box and placed on the digital box. In the end, I was paying full for only half of what I used to watch.

So the greedy green monster whispered to me,"Go change to the digital box lah, only a few dollars more every month mah!", and so I switched.

Then one not-getting-any-better day, the cable operator decided to split the main channels that I was watching into little sub channels. The Discovery channel was split into other sub channels to discover specific things, so you need to watch the Turbo channel to discover cars, Science channel to discover Science, while the National Geographic channel split out a Wild channel for wild animals and Adventure channel for adventures. The main Discovery and National Geographic channels still remained but all the interesting stuff seemed to have gone to the sub channels, which are charged separately.

So the greedy green monster whispered to me again,"Go subscribe to more channels lah, only a few dollars more every month mah!", and so I subscribed to the new Lifestyle group that contains stuff I used to be able to watch on the Education group.

Then one bad day, my video cassette recorder gave up on me. Since I couldn't find any video tape anywhere anymnore (not even Sungei Road), I decided to change my digital box to the hubstation to continue recording. But the customer service told me that they have stopped inventory for the hubstation, and I had to get the hubstation HD instead, which is 75% more expensive because of the word HD. It was not as if I had any other choice, so without the greedy green monster whispering to me, I paid more to subscribe to the hubstation HD.

Then one very very agonising day, March 1 2011 to be exact, I could not view any of the HD channels anymore. Apparently in order to watch a HD channel on my hubstation HD, I need to subscribe to HD Upsize. Else I'll have to watch normal non-HD channels on my hubstation HD.

When the greedy green monster whispered to me again,"Go subscribe to...", I smashed him onto the ground, stepped on him and switched on my TV to watch the AXN non-HD channel on my hubstation HD.